Patrick and Greg:
To put it baldly: Should klists be replaced with regular lists, each
protected by an rwsem (or even a mutex)?
The advantage of klists is that threads can remove or add nodes while
other threads iterate through the list. With an rwsem, only one thread
would be able to add or remove a node at a time, and only when no other
thread was using the list. Considering that klists are currently used
to hold:
the set of all devices on a bus,
the set of all drivers for a bus, and
the set of all children of a device,
(not counting the set of all devices bound to a driver, since
there's already a patch to replace that with a mutex-protected
regular list)
this limitation on adding or removing doesn't seem significant. There
aren't many places where these lists are iterated over or altered. We
could remove most of the overhead associated with klists and get rid of an
extra API for people to learn.
Note that this would be very different from the old bus subsystem rwsem.
That protected too much -- everything associated with the bus subsystem --
making it a pronounced chokepoint. My suggestion involves a separate
rwsem for each of these lists, so that none of them would be subject to
much contention.
Alan Stern
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